In planning any calendar printing mission, the obvious reality to pay attention to is that every calendar is a time-sensitive product with a built-in distribution deadline. For a standard 2014 calendar, in case your calendar just isn’t in the end consumer’s fingers before January 1, 2014, they might have already got discovered another. For a non-standard calendar that deadline could also be sooner (eg., a school-year calendar needs to be within the consumer’s arms close to the start of faculty if it’ll be helpful to them). Working backwards from this absolute deadline can give you a great timeline for all the project.
How are you getting your calendars into the top consumer’s fingers? Are you giving them away? If so, then it needs to be relatively straight-forward to figure out the distribution logistics and determine by what date you have to to have calendars in hand. Or maybe you are mailing them out to your clients or members; in that case you simply must ensure you allow enough time for inserting into envelopes, including a canopy letter, addressing and mailing. Or think about having the printer or an area mailhouse handle mailing the calendars – it is going to probably be cheaper and easier for you. Just make sure you find out from the printer or mailhouse how a lot additional time they’ll need and issue it in.
If, however, you propose to print a calendar and promote it, both as a nonprofit fundraiser or as a profit-making enterprise, then distribution is a bit more complicated. How much time you want for gross sales depends upon your sales technique. Are you promoting at an area festival or other occasion? If that’s the case, then that provides you a deadline, but remember the fact that you may be better off in the event you can sell at a number of occasions, in case attendance or gross sales at one event should not what you expect. Or perhaps you might be having volunteers sell calendars to friends and family or door-to-door. If so, it is best to permit no less than two weeks, and ideally as much as four weeks, since volunteers all have their very own totally different schedules, and a few will want reminders and encouragement.
In the event you print a calendar that you simply plan to sell, you should make sure you develop and implement a stable advertising plan. Marketing does not have to add to the general duration of the calendar mission – you’ll be able to and may start marketing in the course of the planning and manufacturing levels of the undertaking. Nonetheless, if you wait to start out advertising and marketing till you’ve gotten the calendars in hand, then you’ll need to allow not less than just a few extra weeks, maybe extra, in your advertising message to succeed in the supposed viewers and motivate them to purchase.
The production part of a calendar printing undertaking begins whenever you hand off all the photographs, textual content, logos, advertising, and so forth. to the printer, and the printer turns it into calendar artwork so that you can approve after which puts it on the press and delivers to you the completed product. Ensure you speak to your printer early on to fins out how lengthy this takes. In our case at Yearbox, it is usually about three weeks (generally sooner if in case you have a particular deadline). In the event you anticipate last-minute modifications or additions, or if you can be proofing by committee, then it is best to probably enable somewhat additional time – possibly a month in total – for manufacturing.
